


where you must first belong

by basset_voyager



Series: BLACK WIDOW STORIES [1]
Category: Marvel, Marvel 616, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/F, Gen, Multi, Natasha has the supersoldier serum, Natasha-centric, Red Room, another big soup of mcu 616 and stuff I just made up, natasha was not a child in the red room
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-16
Updated: 2014-10-16
Packaged: 2018-02-21 09:04:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2462537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/basset_voyager/pseuds/basset_voyager
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Look for an opening. </p><p>Keep the dance going. </p><p>If you’re not stronger, be faster. If you’re not faster, be smarter. </p><p>These are things Natalia is sure of. </p><p>[The Black Widow is a legend. This is how legends are made.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	where you must first belong

**Author's Note:**

> **warnings: violence, brainwashing, characters not being sure what's real and what's not, references to characters having sex while in the aforementioned state**

There is no love in the Red Room. 

There is no trust, no certainty. There are no ginger candies or crocus flowers or pointe shoes worn through at the soles.

Natalia is not sure she ever had pointe shoes worn through at the soles.

The Red Room is more defined by what it is not than by what it is. 

There used to be a girl who slept in the room next to Natalia, pale as a winter morning with a knotted scar splitting her face in half. She had a box full of photographs stashed behind a brick underneath her cot, and she would show them to you if you shared some of your food with her. The fading images of a mother, a father - a family you could almost believe was yours if you unfocused your eyes and let the faces blur. She whispered to Natalia one night that she had been promised she would see them again. 

The girl with the scar was slower than the others. One day, she was gone. 

The Red Room is not a training facility. The Red Room is not an academy. The Red Room is not a place you can leave. 

Officially, the Red Room does not exist. 

Natalia knew how to shoot a gun long before she came here, but now she feels naked without one. She gets to know each gun like an old friend - compact pistols she can strap to her thigh or next to her ribs, long rifles with scopes that can be broken into pieces and tucked away in a box. There are knives, too, with handles that fit snugly into her fingers. They teach her to spin them in her fingers to get exactly the right angle for bypassing an enemy’s guard. Ignore the way your lungs burn and your mouth tastes of iron. Keep moving until you can drive the point home. 

Natalia’s instructors never tell her when she’s done something well, but she can feel it in the pit of her stomach. The grim satisfaction of survival. 

She is never instructed by the same man for very long, or maybe it’s simply that she can’t remember their faces. It doesn't make much difference either way. They wear uniforms, their mouths are set into identical lines, and they do not speak to her any more than is required. None of them remind her of her father. 

In the Red Room, there are no fathers. 

Natalia is not quite sure if Department X is trying to build an army or find a single perfect agent. Fraternization with other students is not encouraged, but they are not punished when they share food or blankets. At the very least, not always. As hard as Natalia tries to remember the other girls’ names, they seem to slip through the cracks in her memory as soon as she learns them. She settles for knowing them through unreadable glances across sparring mats, through the offering of an extra bite of bread after a difficult round of treatment. She knows them through how they fight, how they bleed, what they can watch and what makes them look away. 

There is one thing that the Red Room has that Natalia would not have expected. The Red Room has stories. 

Not stories like Ivan used to tell, huddled around a fire with his men gathered around him and Natalia underneath his arm. Just whispers. Empty threats in the training room, rumors muttered by doctors, hollow spontaneous dreams. 

This is how Natalia hears about the American. 

She listens when the instructors speak to each other, even though she knows she isn’t supposed to. They wonder if they should bring _him_ here, if she is ready. He is their greatest success, a shining example of what programs like this one are capable of. Sometimes, they refer to him as _it_. More a weapon than a man. Natalia thinks he is American because one of the other students (a woman a few years younger than Natalia who favors her left side) claims to have seen him, and that’s what she says. However, the woman also claims he is half machine, so Natalia is not sure what to believe. 

She knows no more than this. 

She is terrified of him. 

She is not afraid because she thinks they will have him hurt her, but because she worries she will look at him and see herself. 

They do not bring the American until Natalia has run a dozen missions - five infiltrations for intel, four reconnaissance, three assassinations. The first time she put a bullet in a target’s head, she threw up on the floor. Her injections were increased after that, and the second time, she felt nothing at all. They only send her after male marks; it seems to amuse her instructors how she’s able to charm them, how easily they’re taken in by her smirk and her soft voice and her red hair. It’s around the fifth mission that they start calling her the Black Widow, the pride of the Red Room. The name feels derisive in her instructor’s mouths. She wants to chew it up and spit it back out at them. 

Ivan used to say - but there is no Ivan, not anymore. Natalia is not quite sure there ever was. 

How long has she been here? Has she always been here? How long until - until - ? 

They single her out for solo training. She hears the words _asset_ and _soldier_ , and she knows who she is going to see. He is waiting in a training room she has never seen before, a handler hovering beside him as if he’s a bomb liable to explode at any moment. Natalia’s first thought is that he is impossibly young, not any older than she is. The next thing that she notices is his left arm, which is made entirely of metal pieces that click and calibrate when he moves. It looks more like a weapon than a prosthetic, strong enough that he could crush bone in his fingers. She wonders how he lost the original arm, but knows she will never be able to ask. 

When Natalia arrives, the American’s handler is speaking to him in a voice too low for her to hear. She stands at attention and watches them, mentally cataloguing what she sees. The American does not look his handler in the eye. Instead, he stares deferentially at a spot on the ground and answers _da_ or _net_ when asked a question. He looks harmless now, but one glance at the muscles on his real arm and the scars that snake up from under his shirt, and Natalia knows that isn’t true. There is a reason legends are made. 

“Proceed, soldier,” says the handler, and it’s the same thing they say to her when an exercise begins. 

For the first time, the American looks at her. Presumably, nobody has told him not to look her in the eye, and so he does. Natalia tries to stifle her sudden intake of breath. They say that his victims look into his face and see death, and she understands now what they mean - his eyes are blank, empty in a way that makes Natalia feel as if she could be infected by it. She wonders if he is anyone at all. 

She wonders what her targets see when they look at her. 

Suddenly, the American’s face changes, and his head shakes almost imperceptibly, as if he’s trying to shake off a cloud of dust. 

Then he pulls a knife off of his belt and lunges at her. 

Natalia turns to the side automatically to avoid the strike, using her hands to try and leverage his weight forward and knock him over. He doesn’t lose his balance, but instead twists around and switches the knife into his other hand faster than she can see, before coming back for another strike. She ducks, lands a punch on his sternum that he barely seems to notice, then finds herself ducking again. He’s advancing on her relentlessly, putting her on the defensive so he can drive her back towards the wall. His eyes aren’t blank anymore but focused, his breathing trained and even. 

Natalia has lost count of how many times she’s been tested. On marksmanship, on hand-to-hand, on how well she can recall her covers or how much pain she can withstand. This is no different. She blocks the American’s flesh arm, only to get a metal elbow in the face in return. She feels one of her teeth loosen, tastes blood, but uses the split second it takes him to come around for another strike to get her left arm against the back of his neck and unbalance him. 

Look for an opening. 

Keep the dance going. 

If you’re not stronger, be faster. If you’re not faster, be smarter. 

These are things Natalia is sure of. 

Natalia kicks out the American’s legs from under him, and as he goes down, Natalia thinks she sees surprise on his face. He doesn’t drop the knife like she hopes he will, but rolls into the fall and comes back up again, weapon ready as ever. She’s breathing heavily now, and her jaw aches, though she’s reasonably certain nothing is broken. The American flips the knife around in his hand and smiles. It’s not a large smile, just a twitch at the edges of his mouth. His face is blank again almost immediately.

This time, it’s Natalia who attacks. 

She loses track of how long they continue: block, evade, kick, strike, duck, roll. He knocks her over, and she’s so winded she only just manages to roll out of the way of the knife in time. She gets a solid punch in on his face. The knife changes hands more than a few times. The American keeps coming at her, over and over, with no sign of slowing down or stopping. Natalia’s lungs are burning, she’s bleeding from a gash in her right shoulder, if she falls again she may not get back up - 

“That’s enough,” says a voice. 

The American immediately steps away from her, his arms falling to his sides. Natalia notes with satisfaction that his chest is rising and falling almost as fast as hers, and the left side of his face is bleeding shallowly where she managed to scratch him with her nails. The handler uncrosses his arms and makes a few notes on a pad he produces from his jacket. Natalia watches him, wishing she’d gotten a chance to get a look at his face during the fight. As it was, she’d almost forgotten he was there. 

Natalia looks back at the American. He’s perfectly still, hands dangling limply and feet shoulder-length apart - except for his eyes, which dart from the exits to Natalia to the handler and back to the exits again. After a few times, Natalia makes sure to make eye contact with him when he looks at her, but is greeted with the blankness again, like a corpse with its eyes open. His metal fingers twitch.

“Let’s go,” the handler orders, and moves to leave the room. 

“You fight very well,” the American murmurs as he follows. She can’t see his face anymore, but his Russian is clear, unaccented. Maybe the girl was wrong; maybe he isn’t an American after all. There isn’t really any way to tell. 

Before Natalia can respond, she finds herself alone in the room. 

In the Red Room, time seems to either pass by sickening leaps or stop completely. As it is, Natalia is not sure how long it is before she sees the American - if he even is that - again. There is training. There is cold. There are doctors in starch white coats who murmur words she doesn’t understand. In Natalia’s dreams, there is a blank face that is not, upon further inspection, blank at all. 

Natalia sleeps with a man in London, an MI6 analyst with access to the keycodes she needs in order to complete one of an endless list of missions she’s been given. He has ink stains on his fingers and a picture of his wife in his wallet, and he kisses Natalia like it’s the last thing he’ll ever do. Natalia gets what she needs and disappears. 

Being on a mission is a bit like being in a dream. Natalia stands on crowded streets and feels the people rush by her, businessmen and shopkeepers and mothers. They do not see her. She does not want them to. She categorizes them in her mind, dividing them into threats and targets, obstacles and collateral damage. It’s strange to think that when she’s completed her task and gone, all of this will keep going. While the doctors put electric currents through her brain in (where?), there will be children playing somewhere else. There will be lovers kissing in doorways and grandmothers sighing in rocking chairs. 

Natalia’s favorite thing is trains. She likes to press her forehead against the cold glass of the window and watch the countryside fall past. 

She sits on the platform and wonders what would happen if she got on a different train than the one she is supposed to. Where would it take her? How long would it take them to find her? 

The train she’s waiting for rolls into the station. 

She gets on it, like always.

 _Are you afraid, little one?_ Ivan asked, once. 

_No_ , Natalia remembers saying, and then the feeling of his sturdy hand on her shoulder.

 _That’s the spirit._

In the Red Room, there is no place for fear. 

When she returns, the American is waiting for her. From that point on, he supervises her training. They do not tell her why she is training or what for, and she doesn’t ask. The American always has supervision of his own, a different grim onlooker every day. Or maybe it’s always the same man, and Natalia simply can’t remember his face. Either way, he takes notes in a little black book that neither Natalia nor the American attempt to look at. The handler addresses the American only as “soldier,” and that’s how Natalia begins to think of him. 

Training with the soldier is different from training with any of her previous instructors. He does not give her any prepared speeches about Soviet supremacy or bark orders at her from a distant corner of the room. Instead, he stands an arm’s length away from her and demonstrates what he wants her to try, slowly first, then faster. When she gets something right, he nods and says one word: “Good.” 

They spar, but it takes her a long time to knock him down again like she did the first day. His movements are fluid and inhumanly fast. But then, Natalia realizes one day as she sweeps out her leg in an attempt to unbalance him, so are hers. Were they always that way? Wouldn’t she have noticed if something had changed?

“Good,” says the soldier. They start again. 

Look for an opening. 

Keep the dance going. 

These are things Natalia is sure of. 

Natalia watches the soldier’s face, learns to decipher its twitches and changes. There’s the blankness that frightened her so much when she first saw him, but there are also other expressions, which often come and go so fast she misses them if she isn’t paying attention. Sometimes, he looks lost, as if he’s just woken up from sleeping and isn’t sure where he is. It never lasts more than a half a second, but that half a second is when Natalia thinks it would be easiest to get the drop on him. She stores this information in the back of her mind where she hopes that no one will be able to reach it. Other times, he looks frustrated - his mouth hardens and his brows knit together as if he’s trying to speak but somehow can't. This is the expression the soldier is wearing when he breaks her arm during a sparring match by grabbing ahold of her wrist with his metal hand and twisting until it cracks. Afterwards, his face goes blank again, but he does not look away. 

The least common expression the soldier has is a smile. When he smiles, that is when he is at his most dangerous.

He has needle marks on his arm that match hers. 

Once (Natalia is no longer sure how long ago), a girl came to the Red Room with eyes like mud and a smile far too soft for a place like this. Natalia remembers how the needles left angry red ridges up and down her arms. At night, in the barracks when everything was quiet, she taught Natalia how to braid her hair so it wouldn’t fall into her face during training, and while she did so she told stories of wolves and princesses and slippers made of gold. When Natalia kissed her, she tasted like a winter morning. She had scars in the rivet of her collarbone, on the insides of her thighs. At the time, Natalia was afraid that they would hurt each other, that their hands so used to cracking bone and tearing flesh were no longer suited for anything else. The girl just smiled - that smile that was soft and warm and wrong, so _wrong_ here - and carded her hands through Natalia’s hair so it slipped out of the braid she had just spent an hour teaching Natalia to make. 

“We are not theirs,” she said. 

Her name was Lesya. 

One day, she too was gone. 

Natalia repeats these details to herself over and over again as she stares at the ceiling from her bed. 

She tries not to look at the marks on the soldier’s flesh arm. 

They give her another mission, a hit on some general in West Germany whose significance she does not know. 

“Your job is to take out the guards and surveillance and get the target into position,” a handler tells Natalia, looking at the mission report instead of her.

“Not to kill, sir?” The handler pauses. 

“Only if he misses, which he won’t.” 

It’s the first mission that Natalia and the soldier run together. 

He doesn’t miss. 

Afterwards, they sit waiting at the extraction point, an abandoned warehouse outside of Berlin. They had comms during the job but didn’t bother to use them. She knew he was there; it was enough to hear him breathing. The target’s brains splattered the carpet exactly when she expected them to.

Now, she watches him flex the fingers of what she knows is his metal hand. It’s too dark to differentiate between steel and skin, but she can just make out the sound of the arm clicking and whirring as he moves it. She has the odd realization that it’s the last sound many people hear. 

_Are you afraid, little one?_

Natalia cannot see the soldier’s face. 

“Before I came to the Red Room, I was a dancer,” she finds herself saying ( _is that true?_ asks a voice in her head). The soldier does not respond, and they go back to listening to the wind. It must be late autumn, or early spring, and the air bites through her jacket. 

“I can tell,” he says suddenly. It’s the most he’s ever said to her besides “good,” “yes,” “no,” and the one time he told her that she fought well, which she has been beginning to wonder if she imagined. 

“Do you remember who you were, before you came here?” she asks. She doesn’t bother to specify that she does not mean _here_ , on the floor of this warehouse in the middle of the night.

The Red Room is not a place. 

The Red Room is a thing you carry with you. 

The soldier turns his head, and they’d be eye to eye if it were light enough for her to distinguish his features. 

“Yes, I think so,” he murmurs, “Sometimes. But - it’s bad. It hurts.”

She wonders if there could be somebody out there who’s still waiting for him to come home, or if they’ve had him too long for that. She doesn’t even know where he comes from, whether he’s really an American or if that’s just another story. 

“My name is Natalia Romanova,” Natalia repeats, more to herself than to him, “I was born in - in - ”

“Don’t,” the soldier says. 

“We are not theirs,” Natalia replies, remembering brown eyes and braids. 

The soldier laughs, and it sounds like metal scraping against itself.

Natalia thinks she may have been funny, sometime before all of this began. She knows she used to make herself laugh, at least, and it was nothing like the sound of this man-soldier-machine’s low, humorless hiss. 

(Is that true?) 

(Is that real?)

Sometimes, Natalia dreams that she’s sweating in layers and layers of heavy cloth that have somehow become wrapped around her body so tightly that she can’t see, can’t breathe. She tears at the cloth with her fingernails, layer after layer, and when she finally gets to her skin, she peels that off, too. Then she pulls back her muscles and blood and her bones and when she’s finished, there’s nothing left. There’s nothing underneath. 

In the Red Room, you are not someone, but at least you are something. 

The men in the Red Room are not always the same. Some have unfamiliar symbols sewn into newer, sleeker uniforms. They speak in all the languages Natalia knows and some that she doesn’t. Their rhetoric uses different words - order replaces glory, chaos takes the place of the West as the evil looming outside their door. Natalia lets the words wash over her, a stream of sounds without much meaning. When these men say their speeches, they seem to mean them, their voices brimming with enough emotion to be passionate but not enough to be weak. 

She allows herself a smile. 

These men have not learned yet. They do not know that dogmas are not a language that the Red Room understands. The Red Room only understands hands on throats, blood welling up between teeth. 

Somewhere, the gears of politics and war are turning. 

Natalia watches the soldier take apart a Dragunov SVD rotating bolt rifle and put it back together. She thinks: there is nothing but this. 

The gun doesn’t care who holds it. 

She doesn’t see the other students anymore. She isn’t sure there are other students anymore. The men in uniforms call her _the Widow_ and give her a wide berth. For the first time, the name starts to feel like hers, like something she has earned that others cannot touch. In the practice room, she knocks the soldier down, and he smiles. 

There is nothing but this. 

Sometimes, in the middle of the night, Natalia looks at the ceiling and feels like she should cry, but she never can. 

If they leave him unattended for a long period of time, the soldier has a habit of dragging his metal fingers against each other until they make a dull screech. Natalia starts to count the scraping sounds she can hear when they stand close together in the briefing room. 

A group of three. Pause.

A group of two. Pause.

A group of five. Pause.

A group of five. Pause.

A group of one two three four five six se - 

“Stop that, soldier.” 

The soldier stops. 

On her first mission to the United States, Natalia sits in a hotel for sixteen hours waiting for instructions. She watches three game shows and a documentary about Captain America while she cleans her gun.

On one of the game shows, there is a man guessing letters missing from a phrase. 

ERE D Y T INK Y ’RE G ING? 

“Where do you think you’re going?” Natalia says to the screen. 

“Where do you think you’re going?” the contestant offers. 

He wins a lot of money. 

When the time comes, Natalia’s target dies with a sigh. 

She’s in another hotel room in another city when she opens her door to find the soldier sitting on her bed. He’s watching the television, both of his hands lying limply in his lap. His hair is longer than she’s ever seen it; it hangs past his ears and over his eyes. Natalia isn’t sure why she isn’t surprised to see him. On the screen, a man in a black mask and a long-haired swordsman are fighting. 

“There’s something...I ought to tell you,” says the masked man on the TV. He’s been cornered at the edge of a cliff. 

“Tell me,” the swordsman replies. Everything around them looks fake, foam and paint on a soundstage.

“I’m not left-handed either.” The masked man switches his sword to his other hand and spins the weapon impressively. Natalia laughs. 

“I don’t understand,” the soldier says. Natalia sits down next to him on the edge of the bed, careful to keep her moments deliberate and slow. 

“I think the set up to the joke was earlier,” she explains. 

“Oh.” 

They sit in silence for a while, watching the movie. The masked man turns out to be the long lost love of the princess. She thought he’d been lost at sea years before, but he’d only been captured by pirates. 

“I don’t understand,” the soldier repeats, his eyes narrowing. 

“She realized that it’s Westley,” Natalia says, “So she’s diving down the hill after him.” 

The soldier takes a moment to consider this. 

“She should have just run down the hill,” he concludes, finally. 

“That would have been smarter,” Natalia says, allowing herself a smirk. 

The soldier picks up the remote and shuts off the television. The ensuing silence makes the room feel bigger than it is, and Natalia wonders for the first time why the soldier is here. Did they send him? Has she done something wrong? 

_Are you afraid, little one?_

Natalia does not reach for her gun. 

The soldier is scraping his fingers against each other, and for a while the only sound is the _shk_ of metal against metal. He’s looking at something she can’t see, his eyebrows drawn together in concentration. 

“I,” he says, and stops. 

“I know,” Natalia replies. 

“They only let me sleep when they’re not going to let me wake up again,” the soldier murmurs. 

Natalia watches him for several seconds, waiting for him to elaborate, but he doesn’t. He has that look - the lost look. His eyes start darting from his hands to the windows to the door, which Natalia deadbolted when she came in. She opens her mouth to say his name, but then remembers that she doesn’t know it. It’s possible that he does not have one. 

In the Red Room, you are only what you do. 

“Here,” Natalia says instead, and she pulls back the covers of the oversized hotel bed. He stares at her as she kicks off her shoes and starts tugging pins out of her hair, letting red strands fall into her face and onto her shoulders.

“Natalia,” the soldier says, and Natalia is surprised that he remembers her given name. 

She pulls the comforter up to her shoulders and closes her eyes, and, after a moment, she feels the weight on the mattress change as he shifts to lie down next to her. 

“I could kill you in your sleep,” he says, as if the disclosure is important. She smiles. 

“You could try.” 

When she opens her eyes, his face is so close to hers she can feel him breathing. He has blue eyes, and the kind of downturned mouth that must have been perfectly suited for a crooked grin, sometime before. 

They stay like that, close but not touching, their breath stirring the blanket that covers both of them. He’s still scraping his fingers against each other, and she listens to the _shk shk_ of it as she drifts into dreaming. Eventually, the sound stops, and she isn’t sure if it’s because he’s fallen asleep or because she has. 

Hours later, she wakes to the sound of him muttering to himself, a strange mix of Russian and German and English in an accent she can't quite place. 

She reaches out to put her hand on his shoulder. Through his shirt, she can feel the raised scarring where his metal arm meets his flesh. 

“I didn’t want to die,” he whispers. 

She can’t think of anything to say to that. 

The next time she wakes up, it’s morning, and the soldier is gone. It’s the last she sees of him for a long time. 

Natalia looks at herself in the mirror until the face starts to look like it belongs to somebody else. 

(Is that - ) 

She changes her hair too many times to count, she plays the ingenue and the femme fatale and the lone assassin waiting in the dark. There’s blood underneath her fingernails, in the creases of her palms. Before long, there are stories about her, too. Legends. They have names for her. 

The Soviet Shadow. 

( - real?) 

The Red Death. 

(Is that - )

The Black Widow.

( - true?) 

Natalia deals in information, in secrets whispered in safe houses or encoded on disks left at dead drops by men who don’t know if they’ll see the morning. She weaves a network of sources who call her nothing but _Madam Widow_ , and when she falls asleep at night, she does not dream of dancing. 

She always takes the train her handlers tell her to. 

She does not know what year it is, but she never looks out of place.

It feels like autumn. It feels like spring. 

Sometimes, she receives coordinates and information for an item to steal. It’s usually a weapon, though it doesn’t always look like it. Once, the item was a person, a wide-eyed girl with something powerful seething underneath her skin. Natalia remembers being punished after that mission. She does not think the Red Room ever captured the girl. 

This time, the mission is to recover assets from a compromised facility in Norway. She does not know how the location was leaked, or what will be waiting for her when she gets there, but she goes. There is a team behind her, jumpy boys with guns too large for stealth. They whisper when she turns her back. She remembers her instructors, back who knows how long ago, talking about her as if she wasn’t in the room: _and this is the Black Widow. Careful, she eats men alive!_

Natalia goes ahead. She does a sweep for laser grids, then drops in from the ceiling down to the floor of the top level without a sound. It’s just as cold inside as outside, and when she pulls the heavy cloth wrap down from her mouth, she can see her breath expanding in a cloud in front of her. The place has been abandoned; the flickering lights reveal gaping drawers and overturned office chairs. Her priority is the bottom level - records that couldn’t be removed during the initial evacuation because there was no one who could be trusted with them. 

Natalia can’t be trusted with them either, but she’s the closest thing there is. 

“SHIELD ETA fifteen minutes,” says a tinny voice in her ear, “Get in, get files F615 - F630, and get out.” 

Natalia knows the drill - SHIELD or the CIA or MI6 connect this location to some sort of criminal activity, and they come with a team. But spies in those organizations tip off those up top, and they order the place stripped, leaving only false trails and empty rooms. 

Natalia knows this. 

Officially, the Red Room does not exist. 

Natalia ignores the elevator, which is making ominous sparking noises, and pushes open the door to the stairwell. She feels her way down ten flights of stairs, her boots ringing on the metal underneath her despite her best efforts to be silent. It doesn’t matter. Her hands are itching towards her gun. She’s been given a briefcase that will automatically lock when she’s put the files inside, and her palm is sweaty on the handle. 

The bottom level requires a keycode, and she enters it without thinking, without knowing that she knew the right sequence. Inside is so pitch black, Natalia can’t even see her hand in front of her face. She straps on her night vision goggles and looks again. 

It’s a lab, but one that looks like it hasn’t been used in a long time. Natalia reaches out and touches one of the counters; her fingers come away coated in dust. There are empty cabinets, monitors that aren’t connected to anything anymore, and a cluster of IV poles abandoned in the corner. In the center of the room, there’s a chair with straps. Natalia brushes her hand against one of them. It’s almost worn through. The rest of this facility was recently evacuated, but this lab has been sealed up for a long time. 

Natalia goes to the filing cabinet at the back of the room and enters the combination she’s been given. Inside, there is a stack of manila folders stuffed with papers and photographs. She can’t quite make out the labels, even with her night vision, so she just grabs them all and rushes back to the lab door. She’s not quite sure why she doesn’t put them in the briefcase yet. 

“Assets acquired,” she says, pressing down on her ear piece, “No sign of enemy presence. Tell team to hold.” 

“Copy,” the tinny voice replies. 

She’s in a hallway now, bright enough that she pulls of her goggles. There are fluorescent lights that flicker on and off, clinging to whatever power there is left in the building. Kneeling down, she puts the files down next to her and moves to open the briefcase and put them inside.

Her orders are not to look at any of the files. 

_Are you -_

Natalia pauses with her fingers hovering over the briefcase.

_afraid?_

Tentatively, she reaches out and picks up the file on top of the stack. She flips it open - it’s in Russian, with some notes in German in the margins:

PROJECT WINTER SOLDIER

Natalia knows right away that this isn’t something she is supposed to see. She quickly flips through the pages until she finds a black-and-white photograph of a man suspended in a tank of ice, tubes snaking out of his veins. His eyes are closed and his hand is pressed against the outer glass of the tank, and he looks almost, but not quite, peaceful.

 _This is outside mission parameters._

She recognizes his face. 

_Outside -_

“What did they do to you?” she finds herself whispering, reaching out to touch the fading image. 

_parameters._

The lights finally give out. 

There’s a burst of static in Natalia’s earpiece, and then the voice returns. 

“Widow, you’re not moving on our sensors,” it states, “and the auxiliary power is now completely down. What’s your status?” 

Natalia stares at the dark space in front of her where she knows the photograph is still in her hand. There’s a buzzing sound in her ears that has nothing to do with her communicator. Is this where the soldier is now? Packaged up somewhere like a toy on the shelf until he is needed? And for how long - this photo is old, taken with an obsolete camera and folded and refolded a hundred times. Is this something they could do to her? 

Is this something they have already done to her? 

She knows her own file isn’t here - these records are too old, and they wouldn’t risk sending her to retrieve information on herself. But they must be somewhere. The Red Room’s had her for - how long? How long? It’s so hard to guess. 

“Widow, what’s your status?” 

Natalia knows that she chose to come to the Red Room, but when she tries to think of why the memory seeps out of her mind like water through a sieve. It had something to do with Ivan - but who is he? She remembers the warmth of a fire and a strong hand pressed on her shoulder. She remembers quick fingers in her hair and a girl’s smile against her lips, minutes and years later, but she can’t remember the name of the person they belonged to. 

There are noises coming from the floors above - it could be her team, or it could be SHIELD has finally arrived. It doesn’t make much of a difference. As Natalia stands up, the lights flicker on again, bathing the hallway in a sickly yellow glow, but only for a second before the hallway is plunged back into darkness. She tucks the files into her pack and looks at the door she came through, the one that will lead her back up to the south side of the roof where her team is waiting. Then she looks down the hallway in the opposite direction. She has seen the schematics of the building, as much as she was allowed to see and remember. This hallway leads to another staircase, which leads to another hallway, which leads to the air hangar. 

_There’s a train coming._

_Either you get on it or you get in front of it._

Natalia starts to run. 

“Where do you think you’re going?” yells the voice in her ear. 

There’s an aching in Natalia’s head that almost causes her vision to black out. She keeps running, and eventually the hall gives way to the open space of the hangar. There aren’t any planes, but a quick search reveals that there’s at least one snowmachine with gas. Natalia pulls the cover off of the box under the keypad the controls the doors ( _how?_ ), and gets to work on rewiring the connection. 

“They knew we were coming,” calls a voice, and Natalia thinks it’s the voice on the comm until she turns around and sees about a dozen uniformed soldiers pour into the room. None of them notice Natalia at first - it’s dark, and her black clothes blend in with the walls of the building. 

The person who spoke is a woman of about sixty, who holds her gun with confidence despite her age. She’s the only person in the group without something covering her face, and Natalia can see her eyes sweeping the open space. It will only be a few seconds before they fall on Natalia. The heavy doors of the hangar start to rise with a deafening roar. 

Natalia pulls her scarf back over her face and swings her leg over the machine. 

“There!” yells the woman, and Natalia can hear she has a British accent. She can’t help cataloguing that, even now, putting the knowledge away for if she ever sees the woman again. Natalia fires a few shots haphazardly behind her before revving the snowmachine and plunging forward into the snowy night. She pulls her earpiece out and lets it fall behind her. Machine guns chatter behind her - there’s a blossoming of pain as she takes a shot to the right shoulder - _outside mission_ \- the snow makes it impossible to see anything even if she puts her goggles back on - _parameters_ -

Natalia’s not sure how she manages not to die that night in the snow. It’s mostly a blur of whiteness and cold and pain. There’s a town about five miles south, and eventually she stumbles into the Catholic church on its outskirts. She’s bunched up her coat and pressed it to her shoulder, but she still leaves a trail of blood as she drags herself past the benches. If she doesn’t patch herself up soon, she won’t last very long. 

The church is dark except for a few candles burning low near the cross, and she gets as close to them as possible. At first she thinks that the candles are flaring up and then down, but then she realizes that it’s just her vision blacking out. Natalia’s been shot before, but never this far from any type of shelter. A gunshot to the shoulder shouldn’t kill her, there’s just so much blood. At least, she notes to herself, she can be sure that she still bleeds. 

There are footsteps from behind the pulpit, but Natalia can’t bring herself to move. A figure appears in one of the doorways. 

“Hello?” it says, and then: “Oh my - oh my goodness.” 

When the priest comes into the circle of light Natalia could swear that he has no face. 

Natalia doesn’t remember much after that. She has the sensation of being carried, of pain, and of voices she hears but doesn’t understand. For a while, she thinks she’s back with the Red Room doctors, and that they’ve finally decided to take her apart entirely. 

When she wakes up, it’s daytime, late morning by the light, and there’s a man in a suit crouching beside her. She starts to push herself into a seated position. Someone has put a thick gauze bandage over the wound in her shoulder. 

“You shouldn’t move too much yet,” says the man, “You lost a lot of blood.” 

“Who are you?” Natalia asks, and it comes out more accusatory than she means it to. The man smiles. He’s white-haired with a mustache, and his smile seems friendly.

“I could ask you the same question,” he says, “You gave Father Haugen quite a scare, showing up in his church in the middle of the night bleeding like that.” 

“Sorry,” Natalia says, because she’s not sure what else to say. 

“I’m only a town doctor,” the man continues, “I’m afraid I don’t have much experience with gunshot wounds. I did my best, but it may leave a nasty scar.” 

“I don’t mind scars,” Natalia tells him. She looks around at the room - it’s small with stone walls and bookshelves full to bursting. Someone has made a makeshift bed for her out of sheets and a pillow. 

“Are we still in the church?” she asks. The doctor nods. 

“We didn’t want to move you too far. I love churches,” he says, “No matter what you believe, they’re a place of rest and reflection. A place to consider who you are and where you’re going. They’re a place to atone for your wrongs and honor those who have taken care of you.” 

Natalia feels her eyebrows knit together. 

“Where’s the priest now?” she asks. 

“Don’t worry about that,” says the doctor, “You should go back to sleep. It’s time to focus on healing, Natalia.”

“Where’s my pack - there are files - ” Natalia starts to argue, “Wait - Natalia?” 

The old man smiles again.

“It’s time to forget now.” 

Natalia tries to keep speaking, but she feels as if her thoughts are dripping out through her ears. The man’s voice is soothing, steady, and when she closes her eyes she can’t remember what his face looks like. It doesn’t matter anyway. There is nothing but this. 

“Your place is with us, Natalia,” the man was saying, “You will never belong anywhere else.” 

There is nothing but this. 

Nothing. 

_Natalia._

Nothing. 

_Where do you think you’re going?_

There is nothing but this. 

The man’s words are bleeding together into a soft mantra Natalia can’t understand.

 _Is this real?_

_Natalia._

Nothing. 

_Natalia._

_NATALIA._

The man stops talking. Natalia opens her eyes and looks into his, but they’re glassy and wrong, and she looks down at her hands and realizes that she’s grabbed the pen he was using and buried it in his throat. Blood stains her hand red and drips hot down her arm. 

After that, Natalia loses some time. 

She's not sure how long - a few days maybe, or a week. Eventually, she ends up in a motel somewhere in Paris with the bathtub overflowing and the TV turned up as high as it can go. Her wound is healing fast, but she still winces when she turns off the water. Her things are spread out on the bed - fake IDs, knives, her first aid supplies, but no files. She must not have been able to stop the Red Room from taking them back. 

Which identity did she use to check in here? Will the Red Room be able to track it? Do they even know all her identities? Does she? 

Natalia thinks of the photograph of the soldier, put away in a box like an outdated machine. She remembers long ago, before she met him, when she was so afraid that she would look at him and know they were the same. 

The bath is hot. 

Natalia is cleaning caked blood out from under her fingernails when she feels an overwhelming nausea and vomits into the toilet. Afterwards, Natalia washes out her mouth and catches sight of herself in the bathroom mirror. She looks wild, strange, red hair swirling in tangles around her face - and she looks young, mid-twenties at the oldest, skin unlined and unblemished. Shouldn’t she look older? she wonders, but as soon as the thought comes into her mind, the nausea returns and she finds herself bent over the toilet again. 

“My name is Natalia Romanova,” she murmurs to herself, resting her forehead against the cold tile of the bathroom wall, “I was born in - I was born - ” 

She swears she can hear the soldier laughing. 

In the Red Room, no one laughs. 

Natalia spends three days in the motel room, sleeping, eating nothing but throwing up anyway. She hallucinates Ivan, and Lesya, and a girl with a knotted scar. They hold her hands and tell her stories of ballerinas and spies and wolves. She sees the soldier snapping the neck of a target in Bosnia, which is now in front of her bed, and his hands are steady but his eyes are alight with horror. Ivan sits by her bedside and smooths her hair back from her forehead, singing a lullaby too gentle for a soldier to know. 

There is no fear in the Red Room. _Are you afraid?_

At the end of the three days, Natalia fixes her hair and loads a pistol. 

The Red Room is more defined by what it is not than by what it is. 

The Red Room is not invincible. 

As Natalia stands at the train station watching the schedule update over and over, she thinks that she might someday like to dance again.

**Author's Note:**

> Natasha is watching Wheel of Fortune. "Where do you think you're going?" is an actual puzzle solution that has been on that show. 
> 
> The movie that Natasha and Bucky watch is, of course, The Princess Bride.
> 
> Title is a reference to Black Widow vol. 5 #3, when Natasha says: 
> 
> "It is an unteachable skill to belong anywhere. The other edge of that is the unfortunate truth: you must first belong nowhere."


End file.
